Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday January 10, 2013 @09:02PM
from the will-of-the-market dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "During the fourth quarter of 2012, Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones—a significant rise from the previous quarter, which featured sales of 2.9 million Lumia devices. The Lumia line runs Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system, which largely replaced Symbian as Nokia's smartphone software of choice. Despite that shift and Nokia's emphasis on Windows Phone, however, the company still sold 2.2 million Symbian smartphones during the quarter. The question remains whether Nokia should have gone with Windows Phone in the first place, or embraced an alternate platform such as Android; an anti-Elop camp has emerged in recent months, arguing that Symbian was still a viable platform before Elop consigned it to the dustbin of tech history. For now at least, both sides seem to be right: Symbian still sells despite Nokia's attempts to take it increasingly offline, and Lumia phones are selling well. It'll take more time—perhaps a lot more time—before the ramifications of Elop's bet become clear."

Nokia did not sell 4M phones with a new OS (WP7/8). It sold 4.4M smartphones which include Symbian OS.
Only 2.9M were Windows phone.

You are incorrect, and have misunderstood the sentence that discussed the figures. They sold 4.4 million Windows Phone devices this quarter, compared to 2.9 million sold in the last quarter. It is a 50% improvement. From the article:

During the quarter, Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones - a significant rise from the previous quarter, which featured sales of 2.9 million Lumia devices

Nokia used to sell 4million smartphones every two weeks, not every three months.

The current major competitors typically sell more than that on launch day

RIM, which is just before it's new OS launch, and is clearly in trouble sold 6.9 Million phones; almost without any marketing.

Nokia and Microsoft are putting down billions of Euros in subsidies for these phones and more in terms of marketing

150% of nothing is still nothing. A "significant rise" would behave been an increase of 15 to 30 million. That would still not put Nokia near the big league, but would suggest that they have a real chance of getting back.

If you take into account the fact that a huge proportion of these phones were bought by Nokia and Microsoft employees and partners for testing, what you come up with is an App market which has no prospect of expanding to become something close to an "eco system" within the next two to five years.

During the quarter, Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones - a significant rise from the previous quarter, which featured sales of 2.9 million Lumia devices

So they got a 50% improvement going from a non-Holiday quarter to a Holiday quarter, and have sold 14 million total since the Lumia line was released. While Symbian year-over-year sales figures went from 28.3M/quarter two years ago to 19M/quarter last year to 2.2M this past quarter.

Regardless about whether you consider a minor bump for the biggest shopping season of the year "significant" or "selling well", it's clear that Lumia is not carrying the volume it needs to to make up for the death of Symbian.

They're not selling well when compared to iPhones or many Android phones.

However the product is actually quite good (try it, prove me wrong) but the problem is that people aren't willing to give it a shot.
Hopefully the new Nokia Lumia 620 helps crack the mid/low end markets - I doubt quality-wise it will have many competitors in the price bracket. If they went with Android they'd probably be king of the hill right now.

I'm thinking that Nokia will die if they don't downsize, but if they do downsize they hav

Downloaded non-game Marketplace apps that I use at least semi-regularly, from the top:Adobe Reader (sadly, the best PDF solution for WP7 right now).Amazon Kindle (constantly).Amazon Mobile (somewhat infrequently, but it has the cool features like barcode scanning to look up pricing).AuthenticatorG (Google Authenticator implementation).EveMon7 (EVE Online character tracking tool).Flashlight (uses the extremely bright camera flash LEDs).Forward Contact (not built in, sadly).GeekByte

I've seen it before. Excluding the 10% or so that aren't on any smartphone (browser Silverlight plugin? Ha!), the 15% or so that were there when the list was first made and the people who made it were just being idiots, the 30%-ish that have been fixed in Mango or later versions of WP7 (seriously, that list is old; Mango came out a year and half ago, and I'm not counting WP8 changes in that 30% list), the additional 10% or so that were fixed by third-party apps, and the 25% or so that are fixed by homebrew

The screen is nice but nothing special compared to other high end devices. Wireless charging...hardly worth buying a phone for. It is a massive lump though. It is not my choice for a Windows phone, let alone a smartphone.They all have flaws (I think most phones like the SGS3 are too big) and this one has its overall bulk.In my opinion.

Compare this to previous quarterly sales figures for the iPhone [wikipedia.org] and it is not a disastrous as you want to believe. It is certainly not bad enough to make any claim of Lumia sales to have only come from Astroturfers.

That is not a good comparison. The smartphone market exploded. Nokia sold 30 million Symbian smartphones in the quarter before the platform was declared dead. The declared plan was to replace the Symbian smartphones with Windows Phone smartphones in two years. The two years are almost over, the smartphone market doubled (or so), and Nokia sells only 4.4 million Lumia phones. This is a complete failure.

Those numbers are a bit out of date. The current Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] has an updated bar graph [wikimedia.org]; in the most recent quarter listed (Jul-Sept 2012), the iPhone sold 26.9 million units.

If we're to assume that Nokia's goal is to sell a dominant phone platform, rather than a very niche product, these reported sales figures are underwhelming.

You are radically over estimating consumer awareness of anything that is not an iPhone. Most of the people who bought Nokia's Windows Phone did so because they walked into the store and a salesperson recommended it.

Actually, in Brazil the Nokia brand carries a lot of weight. People will buy a phone because it says Nokia here. True or not, around here people believe they need to buy Nokia if they want a phone they don't need to charge every days (sometimes, twice a day).

I have no reason to doubt it is the same in at least some other countries. And regardless, Brazilian cellphone market is huge.

True. In Germany, back before smartphones there were essentially Nokia and a few other companies no one cared about. Nokias were tanks that fit in your pocket, almost indestructible and with long battery life. In 2010, Nokia still had the reputation of being a solid choice (if somewhat old-fashioned as Meego was only starting to pick up steam and people were still associating Nokia with Symbian). I can't say much beyond that as I can only tell about the techie population but most techies I know avoid the co

Nokia is only considered if you have already decided to buy a WinMo phone - and even that may be shaky due to Microsoft invalidating the entire current Lumia line shortly after release by making WinMo 8 incompatible with existing devices (apparently without telling Nokia how to make compatible ones before launching the OS) and making WinMo 8 apps incompatible with WinMo 7, making Nokia's smartphone unit stuck with nothing but futureless legacy phones for the second time in two years. I can imagine that even people who consciously bought a Lumia in 2010/11 would be wary about WinMo and/or Nokia after that.

It sounds like MS is actively trying to destroy Nokia. Their only significant partner when it comes to Windows Mobile devices. Now of course MS is not known to play nice with other companies in general, this sound like downright stupidity from MS's side. They need Nokia as much as Nokia needs them, provided they want to give Windows Mobile at least a fighting chance against juggernaut Android.

It used to be the same here in the UK. Until the Motorola Razr (the original), I don't think there was a single other phone brand which people would seek out by name- Nokia was THE phone brand.

Right up until the iPhone, Nokia was still an extremely popular brand. Post-iPhone there was a lot of criticism of Symbian "looking tired", although it was still popular enough. Post-Elop, I think the brand is more or less dead to people now.

Ditto in India. Used to be that one identified a mobile phone store by the Nokia logo on top of the store. Even now, for feature phones (or dumb phones) people will choose Nokia without a second glance. But everywhere I look, Samsung seems king in smartphones in India.

You are radically under estimating the brand value of nokia. It's on par if not more known and liked then apple in most of the Latin America and Asia.

It took a shitload of hits lately, but it's still extremely high up. They bought themselves a lot of clout with projects like bringing natal care to mothers in rural third world, and they ran dozens of these (and still do to an extent).

He killed the existing OSes, and bet it all on windows phone. Which was a losing proposition, apparently. He was of microsoft stock, which leads people to believe it was malice causing this decision.

Prior to that there were two 'smart' platforms:

Maemo - Linux based, still fairly infantile but showed a lot of promise.

S60 (symbian) - kind of long in the tooth, long lineage. Designed ground up for phones.. great battery life.Nokia had recently opened most of it up, and was moving to to support Qt applications, which was going to make things easier.The most recent release was supposed to be quite decent, from what I've heard.

Anyway, then elop announced they're both dead, and no one develops for dead platforms...

Meego (maemo6) wasn't so immature actually. Some apps are still missing, but I find it to be as feature-complete as any other mayor player, with great responsiveness, and very intuitive UI.Maemo5 (N900) was cool, but too geek-oriented. Meego is perfect for average-joe.

Aside from technically literate consumers who might actually care whether their phone is powered by IOS, Symbian, Windows, or Android, would most consumers be able to meaningfully discriminate between these phone operating systems?

Wouldn't most consumers merely want a phone that works and some working apps for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc?

Aside from technically literate consumers who might actually care whether their phone is powered by IOS, Symbian, Windows, or Android, would most consumers be able to meaningfully discriminate between these phone operating systems?

I think the best way of answering this is to look at the Android graphical interface and compare it to the iPhone GUI and while not identical there is significant similarly for customers to move from one to the other with very little extra learning so basically the human interfaces are functionally similar with nicely designed and separated icons which are labelled underneath with a comfortably readable font. When you look at the Microsoft interface which is "tile based" you see different sized tile icons

People don't care about "the OS" per se, but they care about several things which are related to the OS:

- They care about the GUI. iOS devices have a certain GUI. Android devices all have GUIs with highly shared characteristics. Windows Phone devices have that tile-based GUI. If you don't like the tiles, you could describe that as "not liking Windows Phone".- They care about the apps and hardware accessories. iOS is the king of both- hugely well populated App Store, colossal range of accessories. Android phones have a great range of apps, and a smaller but varied accessory range. Windows Phones currently have few apps, and almost no dedicated hardware accessories.- They care about branding. iPhones are extremely fashionable. Android Phones have built up a great reputation as almost the "standard smartphone"; plus the Google and green android branding is well loved. Microsoft Windows still makes most people think of offices, spreadsheets and beige boxes. For better or worse, those annoying "I'm a PC/I'm a Mac" Apple adverts did hit the nail on the head.

People don't care about NT kernels and Unix-like file systems and Java Machines, no. But the OS doesn't stop with those bits.

well Samsung took android and ran with it and are pretty much second to apple now so much so well apple tries to kill them all the time..

Samsung are ahead of Apple in terms of market share, I believe. Not that that'll upset Apple too much; they're still raking in the profit with margins Samsung can only fantasise about. Samsung will be hoping to change that by persuading more people to go for their premium offerings rather than their mid/lower range devices, but that's a different story.

Most definately! Android and iOS are like "app-buckets", whereas Symbian features all kinds of functionality that these app-buckets simply do not have, which have to be complemented with apps, but kind of suck.

I'll give a few examples of why I choose a Nokia E7-00 (a $600 phone at that time) after Android, even though I'm a fan of Linux on the desktop and free software in general:-Offline maps, with walking directions;-Build in VoIP straight from the dialer app;-Build in streaming internet radio (simply pas

I agree. There are many folks who can live without Instagram [1] or Angry Birds.A good/decent camera with "social stuff" like Facebook and Twitter and solid battery life is all that many people require.

Here in India Symbian still sells, sells well and people still like it, Here are some reasons that I can think of

1. Symbian phones have better battery life than most other smartphones. In a country where people travel a lot and power outages are common, a long batter life is a important. And when you ask and Indian what "good battery life" is , you'll get the answer: "2-3 days".

2. It does the job. SMS, WhatsApp, Skype, Twitter , Facebook are all the apps that people use. Using iFart apps has not really caught on. The downside is people don't use Yelp or Foursquare or GroupOn all that much in India. People just call up friends and ask. Sometimes that's easier and better:)

3. Indians hate paying for apps. Period.

Of course mine is a country of a BILLION people so generalizations are impossible But having stayed in this country all my life and having owned muliple iOS/Android devices ( currently evaluating WP 8).

Footnotes:[1] = More people can live without Instagram, especially thanks to its new TOS

The anti-Elop camp emerged the moment he has announced the Windows strategy in Feb 2011 and a lot of people predicted Nokia's downfall at that time. And in no way do the Lumia phones sell well. Not by any standard. 4.4 million Lumia phone is just pathetic. The Nokia N8 (Symbian) alone sold almost 4 million in its first quarter (Q4 2010) and the smartphone market was much smaller at that time. It is also a lie that Nokia was failing before the strategy was switched to Windows Phone. The smartphone unit had i

Whilst I do really like both my N8 and the 808 (and kinda despise my iPhone), anyone who thinks that Nokia were in a great position prior to Q4 2010 are smoking something dubious.
It has taken Nokia 2 years to get Symbian into something like a decent state (as seen on the latest 808 firmwares) - Android and Apple were improving and growing at a much greater pace.
Of course Nokias problem is down to stupendous levels of incompetence at the top end, management who don't know their posterior from their elbow, that were happily allowing teams to compete with each other, politics that would have made MS management happy beyond their wildest dreams. On that count, Nokia and MS are a match made in heaven/hell (delete as appropriate)

Windows phones are not user friendly. There user screen cannot be properly configured (as with other mobile phones today). They have no options of setting a background image. They are hard to configure, missing features that have existed for years on Symbian, Android and Apple. It is battery unfriendly by nature (a lot of power usage).

For this reason I am never going to buy a Windows phone. I rather move to Android. But I would prefer to continue to use Symbian. But that is not a option I am afraid of. Sinc

They say numbers about Windows 8 and Symbian, but what about Meego/N9? If a platform that they declared dead and buried basically at the moment of launching it, in just one phone, performed in a not so different way than Win8 phones, that would be a big message. There were some numbers around N9 sales for Q4 2011 [osnews.com] and Q1 2012 [blogs.com] that could point that it was selling better than Lumias, but not sure how it evolved. What is possible is that if Sailfish or Ubuntu gets ported to it (have a good shape for the swipe gestures used in those incoming mobile OSs) it could be even start selling back.

Anyway, speaking about dead and buried OSs, Microsoft killed and buried the Window OS bundled in most Lumia Phones when announced Windows Phone 8, saying that present and close enough in time Lumias won't be able to run it, and that apps for Windows 7.x won't be compatible with it neither. Is not so amazing that it sells badly, even for being a Windows phones. You had to wait till Lumia 920 to have a Windows 8.

...and I suspect that is personally why everyone is currently going along with this madness,if they break the agreement with Microsoft now...Microsoft will want there money back. In real terms however the last figures I saw of costs of transition to Windows Phone was 10Billion...the cost in terms of staff, output, brand obviously make this figure a lot higher.

The world's biggest smartphone maker (and biggest dumb phone AND feature phone maker, while we're at it) inexplicably abandoning two popular platforms, which combined were outselling all rivals literally doubly so, and which the company owned all rights and licenses to internally, to pick Microsoft's platform instead. If that doesn't sound like something that is being done for Microsoft's benefit, I don't know what is.

Admittedly, I'm more a fan of the stupidity argument rather than the malice one. But it's

You're looking at the term "smartphone" through a modern lens. The term originally (and still does, I guess) apply to Blackberrys. Nokia's Symbian offerings were more or less the same as, if not better than, the Blackberrys of the time; certainly when it came to web browsing, media playing, etc.

When iPhone came out, followed by Android, the same fate befell both BB and Nokia- their phones looked crappy by comparison. Nokia's solution was a new platform (Maemo/MeeGo). But to say that Symbian wasn't a smartph

Symbian was popular, but it was a disaster in terms of technology: hard to program with one of the worst mobile user interfaces ever conceived. Nokia needed to change to something else. Windows 8 is actually not that bad in principle, but it was too little too late, and Microsoft has failed to establish it as a viable and popular platform for app developers.

Nokia should have gone with a dual Android (cash cow) and Meego (risky bet, high payoff) strategy. Nokia could have made fantastic Android phones. By now, they have lost their sales channels and their brand name, and lots of other companies have figured out how to make good hardware, so they are basically toast.

... of which none did deliver or were stillborn. The cross platformness of Qt was compromised from the start with two competing UI frameworks libdui for Harmattan and Orbit for Symbian. This [taskumuro.com] is a good article about that mess. And from what we know about Meltemi, it would have been a third, incompatible framework.

Nokia did achieve only the minimum target for Symbian, and that is to retrofit Qt 4.8 to Symbian 9.2/^3.

Before anybody blames Elop for this, 90% of it happened before his time.

They are selling that well in the benelux countries that Nokia is dumping Lumia phones on aldi, a discount supermarket chain. A model that sold for 499 euro six month ago for 199 euro. I still wouldn't want it for that price to be honest.

Recently my samsung galaxy note had some accident, so until it was repaired i was forced back to use my old nokia e63. Funny story: for email and podcasts (which is what matters to me on a mobile) i found that actually more productive, even after 2 years of using android phones/tablets, especially taking into account the battery life. I then checked in a store for the current symbian phone models, and i can honestly say: There is nothing in the smartphone world which matches the price/performance ratio of these.They are cheap, well designed, have an os where the bugs have been fixed. The UI is sensible, i can take one in my hand and still use it without thinking.

I would rather buy a new symbian phone as a second cheap reliabe outdoor phone for sports etc. than a nokia lumia (even if these are no bad either).

If nokia would not have bragged so much about changing the platforms, the best thing they could have done would have been to put a decent kernel below and keep the API stable.

I have a Nokia E71 as backup. To be honest it's much better than all the android smart phones out there for productivity. It would probably be smarter of me to get a cheap tablet for playing games and watching movies in bed and use a symbian phone for daily use. The two killer features of Symbian for me are (a) battery life which can be nearly a week and (b) voicemail app that records directly to the handset which means I can just listen to my latest message without going through the previous 20 to get to i

There are a number of features which i love the note 2 for. Funnily the ultimate killer feature in the daily use of the note 2 is the idea that it vibrates shortly if you pick it up and there is a new message. This is so fucking brilliant and practical - you just can miss a new message with this. I also like the "flip over to turn silent" idea.

May I ask you what you are doing with your pocket computer? I am always wondering if people do somethying with their smartphones that I can't do. The only thing I have seen so far is watching videos, this does not really work on my old one. Checking emails and listening music are working fine. The webbrowser is not comfortable on that small screen, but it works for all important pages. This model does not have GPS yet, which can be useful sometimes, just Ovi Maps (free offline world map).
My battery life is

For one, it's an ARM processor. Those things are more and more prevalent, and there are already servers using them. As we are heading towards exascale supercomputers during the next years, power consumption is playing a bigger and bigger role, especially on this very high-end scope (which is my area of work). I expect ARM supercomputers to appear on the Top500 on the next few years, and making the news as soon as universities start to assemble clusters of Raspberry Pi and the like, or that Parallella machin

My 5230 plays videos just fine and offers a resolution that is exactly half of the 720p, which means no resizing artefacts. It also has Nokia Maps (they rebranded ovi maps back to nokia maps some time ago).

Same here, still using my 5630. I don't want these huge phones nowadays, with a battery life of a day or two.

Your mistake is that you are thinking of them as phones. Really they are pocket sized computers that happen to be able to make calls. If all you want is to be able to make calls then I agree smartphones are pointless. Obviously many people want something more than just a telephone, myself included.

My last Nokia phone (a Nokia E series phone) could technically do everything an iPhone or Android phone could do but it was a huge pain-in-the-a$$ to actually use. The interface sucked and was never updated. The software to communicate with my PC was horrible to the point of uselessness. We surfing was so bad it was pointless to try and email wasn't much better. Technically it had all the same features as the iPhone of the same period but it simply wasn't worth the trouble. It worked acceptably as a ph

My 5230, which is ancient my modern standards (it's from symbian generation that came around the same time as first iphone) received its last update 19.11.2011 according to phone management that I just checked.

It went through over five major iterations and upgrades of UI during its lifetime (each 10 version up was a major OS overhaul).

Few updates were ever produced for it and none were what I would describe as major improvements. It was a E70 which was a S60 phone. Nokia basically abandoned the phone. My experience with Nokia is that they spend all their time fussing with the hardware (which is usually decent) while they do nothing but checklist feature implementations that technically can do the job but are horrible software to actually have to use.

Earlier Nokia phones I owned required sending the phone to Nokia for a firmware update

I've got the last Symbian phone; Nokia 808 - works perfectly.
And of course the camera on it is truly excellent, truly decent optics, and image quality thats resulted in my DSLR being used quite a lot less.

Have you actually used a Symbian device recently, or is this just a knee-jerk reaction? I have an E6-00 with the latest release of Belle on it, and I like it a lot. It's stable, the battery life is great, and it has a physical keyboard. It does everything I need a smartphone to do, which is why I thought we bought the things to begin with.

...I doubt it. Ironically in the context of this article Android the Os that Nokia did not choose is set to overtake Windows in Market share this year to become the dominant OS...and Sells 1.5million daily. Windows Phone sold 4.4Million...and is already expecting to sell less next quarter in its own release..

So wait a second here. The submitter is pointing out an anomaly or fluke in the statistics, and you assume he's a Microsoft hater? Submitter says he'll wait awhile to see what happens before passing judgement. And, he's a hater?

Sounds more like you're a fanboi, and anything that doesn't praise Microsoft is "hate" in your book.

Stop sniveling - there are many ways to do things, without relying on Microsoft. It's not OUR FAULT that your junior high school only has Microsoft products. Maybe when you get to

One small problem: GP never mentioned any such thing, and never performed any "frothing at the mouth". The anomaly is that Symbian was (according to Elop) supposed to be dead by now, yet it sees increasing sales.

It's people like you that necessitate a "-1 Miserable Astroturfing Shill" mod so, so badly.

It is about the old saying: "fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you".

Slashdot has a very specific audience, and one that has had to live with all shit microsoft spat on our faces for the last 3 decades. There was hardly a moment where their product was better, more stable or faster than the competition. I will not even mention how many companies microsoft destroyed just because they wanted to, either by releasing half-baked software, or by just announcing vaporware. The would-be competitor w

Amazon isn't even in the Open Handset Alliance. They take the source from AOSP, and then customize the interface beyond recognition. So, yes your post is a bit misleading and disingenuous and reeks of shilling.

So, let's see how many mod points you've got on your 10 other accounts yeah?

(1) My point, which I assume was obvious to other people, regarding having a modern version of Android on my 'Fire was precisely that I have it to compare against Windows Phone 7.5 as a small-device OS. You do realise you can replace the OS on a 'Fire?

(2) This is my only account which I've held pretty much since Slashdot started.

(3) Are you aware that your posts are nothing more than ad hominem attacks? Do you accuse everyone who disagrees with you of "shilling"?

Well, I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I honestly don't think the overwrought expressions of WinPhone's inferiority common on this thread come from anyone who has seriously (or even actually) used the product. The press reviews are almost unanimously very positive and that matches my experience.

Even if you add two OS's together Windows/Symbian competitively it looks like Elops strategy of choosing a Windows Phone OS *only* over *any* other strategy looks stupid. In real terms it has taken the smartphone unit from being 2x as large as Apple and 4x as large as Symbian, and relegated Nokia to 10th largest smartphone manufacturer.

Their intention several years ago was for Symbian to become entry level, and to a certain extent that was happening with devices like the 5230/5530.
The 808 is a truly excellent device, with a camera that I doubt anyone will get close to for a few years (as the N8 has yet to be bettered by anything other than the 808).